The increase in the availability of computers and associated software to create lists to manage information, along with cost-effective variable digital printing (VDP) in small quantities, has made the acceptance of integrating customer-supplied lists into the “print” production process a common occurrence.
The conventional processing of a customer-supplied list that is provided with no standard format required a skilled computer operator to either remap the fields in the list to a normalized format, or to program variable imaging software to utilize non-standard information. If done conventionally, this process would take one-half hour to days depending on the complexity of the project. Since the work would typically be performed by a programmer who is unfamiliar with the data, the possibility of error increases dramatically. In addition, every job would be started from scratch since there is no mechanism to recover and reuse prior programming efforts.
There is an unmet need to address the above-identified deficiencies in conventional processes and to provide new functionality for management of customer-supplied lists.